welcome to your gory bed
by Lorata
Summary: prompt: victors, sorrow found me when I was young; sorrow waited, sorrow won. 19 named victors in the Hunger Games trilogy, and not a one escaped unscathed.
1. Chapter 1: Districts 1 & 2

prompt: **victors**, _sorrow found me when I was young; sorrow waited, sorrow won_

* * *

**Chapter 1: Districts 1 & 2**

**Cashmere**

Little sister, first Victor. That's the way it is in District One. The girls go in at sixteen, young enough to tempt the sponsors, and that means Cashmere graduates from the Academy while her older brother still has a year to go.

She doesn't think anything of it until they pull her from the Arena, scrub the blood and filth and charcoal from her skin. They have to trim her nails down to the quick to remove the last of the Four Boy's guts. She stinks of death and sweat and rotting wounds. It sticks in her nose even after she's been rubbed pink and clean, rinsed with perfume and wrapped in a robe of soft, soft wool. "Like your name, sweetie," whispers one of the prep team, and strokes a hand over Cashmere's hair as she stares at the wall and imagines it splashed with red.

Everyone wants to touch her, and she's a Victor now and that means they can. They all want a taste of the merchandise before they commit to buying. Cashmere staved in the skull of another boy with her mace, but now she has to smile and wink when one of the sponsors slides his hand up her skirt at a party. She pats his wrist and thinks about snapping the bones in two. Later that night she grips the headboard and imagines smashing his head against it until the skull fractures and the pillows lie heavy with blood.

In the time between her win and the day her brother stands on the reaping stage, Cashmere learns truths no one should ever have to see. She peels back the ugly surface of the world and peers into its decaying soul. There are secrets in this world that no little sister should ever have to tell her big brother, assuming he ever makes it out to hear them.

One year later, Gloss staggers from the Arena, soaked in blood and grinning like a madman. Cashmere weeps and hurls a lamp against the wall because he made it out alive.

* * *

**Gloss**

When Cash was six, she skinned her knee. They were running, racing up a hill, and Cash was faster than him even then but he was bigger and he used to cheat. He took a rocky path up that her little pink sandals couldn't handle, and her shoe snapped against a stone and down she went. She wailed and wailed and Gloss ran back, and when he scoffed and said it wasn't anything she threw a rock at his head. "I know that!" She scowled at him, cheeks puffed out. "I'm not a baby. You're supposed to kiss it better anyway. You're the worst big brother ever!"

Well, that taught him quick. Gloss kissed her knee, then her forehead, then he carried her piggyback down the mountain with her drumming on his head and giving him commands like a horse.

Gloss loves the Academy for giving him a purpose, for showing him what he always used to think, that he and Cash are special. He loves the Capitol for giving them the opportunity to serve, to be a hero. He's not a little jealous that he has to wait until after Cash wins to get his turn, but the Academy knows best and he trusts them to do the right thing.

Nothing prepares him for the Arena, for the pain and the screams and the horror, but it's worth it when he makes it out, when he stands on that stage in front of thousands of people screaming his name, and his sister waits for him on stage, resplendent and glorious. Until she takes him in her arms that night, holds his face, and tells him that the worst horrors are yet to come. He looks at her - really looks - and sees the wild darkness in her eyes. Somewhere in the year since he wished her well and the train took her away they've taken the little girl with the pink plastic shoes and replaced her with something twisted and hard.

He asks what happened. She says, "You'll see."

Cash isn't his little sister anymore. He hates them for taking that away, even before he finds out how.

* * *

**Brutus**

Brutus is five years old when one of the girls at school calls his dad a dirty quarry rat. Brutus pushes her down and grinds her face into the dirt until she takes it back. The school calls home, and Dad actually leaves the mines early - that means he doesn't get paid for the afternoon, that means he'll have to work longer tomorrow - to come pick Brutus up and take him home. He takes Brutus out back behind the house and makes him move a pile of rocks from one side of the yard to the other.

"Real men don't hit girls," Dad says, and his eyes are dark with disappointment and that's worse than trembling arm muscles and sore shoulders. He cuts off Brutus' protest with a look. "I don't care what she said, little man, that's not how we behave."

Brutus tries. He really does. He loves his parents and he knows they're best, but the other kids don't get it. The other kids are stuck-up or stupid or mean, and sometimes the anger gets so strong that the only thing Brutus can do is lash out. He tries to keep it to the older boys who like to fight, but sometimes the girls laugh at him and he can't help it. It's the worst thing in the world to be laughed at by a girl.

The third time it happens Dad moves rocks with him, and that's after fifteen hours in the quarries. Dad's exhausted and hungry and just wants to go inside to eat supper and go to bed, but he stays outside and hauls the rocks across the yard with Brutus, and that sticks in Brutus' throat like a chicken bone. Dad doesn't hit girls. Dad's a good man. Brutus is - he doesn't know what he is. He knows what he wants to be, but then the next day one of the girls sneers at his patched clothes and the rage boils up again.

School says he needs to join the Program or be expelled, and that means Mom would have to stay home with him all day and that means less money and that means less food. They tell Mom and Dad there's a stipend, that they'll get money every year he's in the Program. Brutus sits up straight in the hard wooden chair and tries to look grown up.

"I want to do it," he tells them. "I want to go. I can contribute." _Contribute_ is a word he knows. It's a word that chafes him because his parents do and he can't, not yet, but now he can.

"He doesn't have to go all the way," Mom says to Dad. She lays a hand on his shoulder. "It might help him to channel his anger."

"They ain't gonna channel it, they're gonna encourage it," Dad says in a low, furious voice. "They're gonna fan it and use it and make it worse." But Brutus is in the room and they don't fight in front of Brutus. That means there will be hushed, sharp whispers from behind the bedroom door tonight.

"In the early stages it's more of an extracurricular athletics program," says the principal, but he looks at Brutus, at his strong arms - Brutus has to move a _lot_ of rocks - with something strange curling under his expression. "There's no obligation to continue."

"I want to," Brutus says again.

Dad sighs and looks at his hands. "Will they make him fight?"

"Oh, no, not until much later," the principal says. "No one's forcing you to make a decision right now, of course. Take the brochures with you. Recruitment doesn't begin until he's seven, so you have plenty of time."

They take Brutus to the Centre just to see it. There's lots of kids from all over the district - that makes him nervous, lots of people to laugh at him and call his parents names - but they all wear the same thing, bright white uniforms provided by the Program, and that means no one can look at his clothes and laugh at him or say his parents shouldn't have had a kid. There's food, too, and Brutus and his family don't need charity but at the same time he ain't ever seen strawberries like that before.

Dad and Mom have a lot of closed-door conversations and Brutus does his best to be good and finally Dad says yes.

The first day of training, Dad takes Brutus there himself. They get to the big white building with the big big doors, and Dad kneels down and holds Brutus by the shoulders like he's a man. "Remember," Dad says, and this is important, it's the face he makes when Brutus ain't allowed to forget. "Remember, whatever they tell you, you don't have to hurt anyone. Okay? Remember what real men do."

"Real men don't hit girls," Brutus echoes, and an older girl breezing through the door overhears and winks at him. Her grin is wide and sharp and he thinks she probably wouldn't mind if he did.

They don't make him fight at first. It's just games, lots of running fast and climbing things and throwing things, and they play at running around in the woods and throwing balls at each other and that's not so bad. Nothing to be scared about. Until the afternoon that one of the bigger girls knocks Brutus away from the rope he was climbing, and when he says it's his she tells him to make her give it back if he wants it so bad. He's about to when he remembers Dad's warning, and so Brutus lets her and she laughs and one of the trainers makes a disappointed 'tch' sound and tells him maybe he shouldn't be here after all if he can't be the least bit competitive.

It burns under his skin all day, and when Dad comes home, for the first time in his whole life Brutus doesn't run to the door to greet him. "Uh oh," Dad says, and he sits next to Brutus on the couch. "What'd your old man do?"

Brutus tells him, and Dad's face goes pinched around the nose. "What was I supposed to do?" Brutus demands. "She's bigger than me. Asking nicely don't work in the Centre. You get in trouble if you say 'please'. If I can't then they'll cut me and then there's no more money and I won't be able to contribute anymore." He'll have to go back to school, full of kids who don't understand what it's like to feel like he's holding a whole rushing river underneath his skin.

Dad swallows. "All right, new rule, then. When you're in the Centre, you can hit a girl as long as she's bigger and stronger than you. Okay?"

The next day Brutus finds her - she's with her friends, laughing as they throw hard, bouncy balls against the wall and try to hit each other on the rebound - and shoves her down. She leaps up, face red, and they fight and she pulls his hair and he kicks her in the stomach and in the end he's not sure who wins because the trainers pull them apart. They tell him to go back to his age group, but they give him a cookie first. Brutus usually doesn't care much for the Centre food but the cookie tastes good today, though it leaves a weird, guilty taste in his mouth.

He's eight when one of the girls in his age group - she's from the quarries too but her family ain't as good as his, she has sharp elbows and hungry eyes and she nicks food from the kitchens - tries to take his apple. Brutus doesn't even care about the apple really but it's his, and there are lots more, and when she takes a swing at him he hits her back without thinking. She snuffles with her nose full of blood and slinks off to steal from one of the others instead. The trainers let him have a muffin.

He tells Dad, and Dad goes quiet again. "Okay," Dad says, and his voice is tired and strained. "I guess you can if she starts it, but pick your battles, little man. A real man doesn't need to go around pushing people. Who cares if she took your apple? It's just a snack."

Brutus hangs his head and says he'll remember.

He's ten when one of the new girls, a seven-year-old, challenges him to a fight. He says no - she's so much smaller than him, and she has the look of rich people, soft curls and soft hands, which means she ain't got in fights before - but she just keeps on bugging him until finally he knocks her down. She gets up, giggling, and runs away the way the girls back in school used to do after they cornered a boy and kissed him.

Dad says it's fine if the girl asks him to, and if it's all in fun. They don't talk much for the rest of supper.

Brutus is almost eleven when he and that same girl get into a fight. They're friends, kind of, he thinks they are, and that should mean they can get mad at each other and it's okay, except that she's madder and meaner than him and she just - she pushes his buttons, that's all, she knows how to get under his fingernails until he snaps back. They fight and he gets her arm up behind her back and that should be it, she should fall and he'll let go except she doesn't, and he doesn't, and something burns inside him and makes him do the thing he never should, makes him take it that one step further. Instead of letting go he twists harder, and that's the first time Brutus learns that a bone snapping sounds like stepping on a tree branch, or maybe breaking a giant stick of celery in half.

He breaks her arm, and the trainers give him strawberries. Once the girl's out of the infirmary, she gets some too because she didn't cry.

Dad is furious, but he doesn't make Brutus move rocks. He tells him to stay inside with Mom and help her clean the house, then Dad goes outside - even after a long day, even before dinner - and moves the rocks himself even though there's a storm coming down from the mountains. For the most part Brutus hears nothing but footsteps and the clack of stone against stone and the occasional grunt of effort, but sometimes, when the wind howls strong, there's something else, like a shout or scream, but when the wind dies down it's always gone. Dad stays outside until Brutus falls asleep waiting for him.

Brutus is thirteen when his parents sign the papers that mean they won't see him anymore, that the Centre owns him until they see fit to let him go. It's hard, but it's okay. The longer Brutus stays, the more money his parents get. It's better for everyone this way. "I'll come back," Brutus says. Most kids who wash out of the Program go to the dorms, they tell him, but he won't. "You'll see. It'll be fine. And then I'll never hit girls again, Dad, I promise."

"Just promise me one thing," Dad says, and he doesn't have to kneel this time, just crouch a little, and his hands are just as firm and strong on Brutus' shoulders. "You stay good, you hear me little man? Whatever they tell you, you're good inside. Keep hold of that."

Brutus doesn't know about that. In a way it's almost a relief to get away from Dad, from the silence and the disappointment and the sense that Dad wants to shy away from him but can't. There's something ugly inside him that's not inside his parents, and maybe if they're not always right there, making him feel bad with their goodness, the ugly part of him won't feel so strong by comparison.

It's different in Residential. Everyone's meaner, tougher, harder, and the fights are faster and more violent. Brutus breaks all of Dad's rules in the first three days. In Dad's absence, he makes new ones, sure that Dad would agree.

Real men don't hit girls, unless they're bigger, unless they start it, unless it's just for fun - those are Dad's rules. To those, Brutus adds a few more: unless she has a weapon; unless she's going to hurt him; unless the trainers are watching; unless it's a competition.

He's fourteen when they send him out into the woods with nothing but his fists and make him wait for the target. The others in his year don't talk about it - maybe just a sentence, a small detail like what their eyes looked like, or how they smelled, or how one of them couldn't stop thinking about what he had for breakfast - and Brutus doesn't know what to expect until the target bursts out of the trees. It's a woman, wiry and insane, and later he'll find out she broke into an old couple's home looking for something to steal and killed them when they woke up, but for now all he knows is that she's there, and so is he, and only one of them is leaving the woods alive.

Training takes over, and soon enough Brutus stands over her body with his fingers wrapped around her throat. There's no blood, at least, and Brutus staggers back, staring at his hands with wide eyes, and they pull him out and tell him his score and he doesn't have to show up to training for the next three days so get some rest.

It's not until he's back in his room that he remembers Dad at all, and when he does Brutus grips his hair with his fingers and lets out a high, keening sound he's never made in his life. _Be good_, Dad said. _Stay good_. Brutus wants to. He does. But the Centre is his life and the Centre serves the Capitol and Brutus wants to serve the Capitol, and he can't make it all fit together. Brutus stays awake for two days before he makes one last rule, the rule that settles it in his chest and lets him breathe again, and from then on he doesn't question anymore.

It's the rule that propels him straight through the rest of training. It holds him through his field test, the endurance tests, the four other kill tests until he stands up on the stage and promises his every breath and heartbeat to his district, the Capitol, and Panem. That morning two people come to see him in the Justice Building, and they match the faces in his memory except that they're older, and smaller, and they look at Brutus like they're afraid of him and that settles it, doesn't it, they've all made the right choice. Brutus was never a good little boy and he's found the path that will use him as he's meant to be.

The next week, Brutus springs from the platform toward the Cornucopia, snatches up the sword he knows is for him because it's twice as heavy as the others. The first target in front of him is a girl, maybe fourteen years old, wearing the red piping that marks her from District Five. Brutus looks into her wet, terrified eyes and doesn't need to rationalize because that final _unless_ has long drilled itself into his brain and suffused him with cold, beautiful clarity:

_Unless the Capitol tells him to._

Brutus swings - the girl falls in a spray of blood - and one way or another, his father will never see his little man again.

* * *

**Enobaria**

She's popular in the Capitol in a way that most Twos aren't. The others from her district tend to be serious, very career-oriented (har har), and when they come in to the city it's for work, networking and sponsorship agreements and parties where they stand around talking to powerful people in the hopes that one of them will have the heart to send a tinderbox or bottle of salve to one of their kids down the line. Brutus methodically fucks his way through the reams of Capitol socialites who want to get with a Victor, focusing less on the giggling heiresses who touch his biceps and tell him he's _so strong_ and more on the older, harder women with money and power and the urge to use it. In the Village they all pretend not to know that he'd really hoped for a wife and a kid or two to make his life not such a time-suck of work work work but them's the breaks, shoulda thought of that when he was thirteen and got that last chance to back out.

(This is why another reason why the Capitol doesn't sell Twos; it doesn't need to. Brutus knows his duty, knows what he has to do to get recognition and cachet, and nobody had to put a gun to his head to do it. Sometimes people pay money to be put on a Two's radar, but that's just like a compass. It's not the same thing, and they know it. They know it, and the Victors who aren't so enterprising know it, too.)

Enobaria doesn't do that because she's not a mentor - not sane enough for that, too broken, too angry, not her mentor's fault but there you go - and she admires the others for their dedication but it's not for her. She made a name for herself in those final frenzied days of the Arena, when the blood and the dirt and the slow creeping ache of starvation drove her past that final edge. She'd looked at the boy from District Seven who'd magically managed to survive this far and thought no, no no no, no he did not get to be here, he did not get to wear that crown. Did he make his first kill under the camera's watchful eye at fourteen, no. Did he say goodbye to his family and move to a dormitory filled with other tiny killers in training, did he fight for every scrap of validation, every piece of dessert, every moment of free time, no he didn't. Did he spend thousands of hours learning how to find cameras, how to angle himself to them without making it obvious, how to smile and sneer and snarl, how to slash so the blood flew up in an aesthetically pleasing manner without smearing the primary lens - no, and no, and no.

She'd looked at him, at those wide brown eyes, red and wet and rimmed with fear - he stank of it, or maybe that was just the sweat and the piss and the filth - and she wouldn't let him have it. Not just that, but the desire stuck in her to make him realize just how badly he'd fucked up by thinking he could do this, to remind everyone watching that this victory belonged to her, not some snivelling snotrag smart enough to hide and wait for the others to finish themselves off.

Enobaria tore his throat out with her teeth, and by the time she finished throwing up the hunks of flesh and strings of muscle, by the time she'd smeared the blood across her face because her sleeve was too dirty to wipe it all away, her fans in the Capitol had already made animated images from the footage and were sharing them with their friends.

They all assume she sharpened her teeth herself - she guesses the doctors who did it while she was out were paid to keep quiet, or maybe someone told them it was her request, who knows. It doesn't matter now. It takes Enobaria months to stop slicing up the inside of her cheek or biting off chunks of her tongue when eating or talking. Her mentor gives her a mouthguard to wear while sleeping, and it's rubber and uncomfortable and fills with spit by the end of the morning, but it means she can sleep without waking up choking on her own blood. She laughs in the morning as she drains the saliva into the sink and puts it back in the drawer by her bed, laughs and laughs and laughs and leans forward while pink smears drip from her mouth onto the porcelain.

Girls in the Capitol have inlays done to make their teeth look like hers - they open their mouths to her, and she laughs and looks at their soft, pale throats and very carefully doesn't imagine ripping the jewels they've sewn into their collarbones. Men flirt with her for the privileged position of being shot down, and she delights in cackling in their faces and asking if they really want these teeth near their most important assets. No one ever says yes; they enjoy the danger, but Enobaria is like a live wire. Stand close enough to feel the charge, but don't touch unless you want to stop your heart.

Enobaria is only speechless once, when a young Capitolian with purple hair like cotton candy lifts her baby, a little pudgy thing that Enobaria could kill one-handed if she wanted to. The mother holds him up, juggles him in one arm and says, "Okay, sweetie, now show me, what's Enobaria do?"

The baby giggles, then snaps his toothless mouth at Enobaria's neck.

(There's an entry in the Capitol Dictionary of Games-Related Colloquialisms as follows:

**Bari'd** (v., past participle; origin, 62nd Hunger Games; originator, Enobaria, District 2)

1. to be beaten; to be put on notice; to be called out; to be defeated in an argument to the extent that any recovery is impossible - _Damn, son, you just got Bari'd!_

2. to be so viciously turned down for a date that everyone in the room feels your pain - _I thought I had a chance with her, but she totally Bari'd me. Well that's what you get for going for a Cashmere!_

There could be worse legacies. There definitely could be better ones, but there could be worse.)

* * *

**Lyme**

All tributes from District Two go into the Arena with the same token. It's a thick bracelet worn on the right wrist, eleven black strands of leather braided together and strung with different-coloured beads. The number of beads differs from tribute to tribute, but the colours are the same: orange, red, silver, gold. Orange for animals. Red for humans. Silver for the mock-Arena field test. Gold for Volunteers. It's both a secret and a promise, the Centre that trained them, raised them, moulded them, made them who they are. It's a reminder of where they've come, what they've sacrificed to be here.

If a Two wins, there's often not much left of the bracelet. The strands will be soaked with blood, the finish on the beads scratched, and sometimes the leather frays or snaps right through. That's why, if a Two wins, their mentor gives a drawing of the bracelet to a special artist down in Career-town at the base of the mountain beneath the Victors' Village, and he inks the swirl of black and dots of colour right onto their wrists. It marks them, sets them apart and binds them together all at the same time, this community of killers that no one else could possibly hope to understand.

Lyme can't stop looking at hers. At first the skin is red and puffy and irritated from the dye, the slide of the needle beneath her skin, and it itches and burns and never leaves her alone. She scratches at it until her mentor tells her to let it be, but how can she let it be when it never leaves her alone? Lyme's convinced that the tattoo artist put capsaicin in with the dye because even when she closes her eyes she feels the tattoo winding round her wrist like a snake.

Her mentor catches her one morning in the kitchen, standing over the sink and scrubbing her arm with salt while the wound oozes raw and red but the ink stays clear. "No, little girl," he says, sharp and firm, never mind that she's almost as tall as he is. He drags her into the bathroom and washes the salt away, bandages it up with gauze, and at least the smooth stretch of white against her skin is better than the band of black.

But it's not enough, and fourteen people are dead because of Lyme - more than half of them under the legal age - and soon after he finds her with a paring knife and has to stop her from sticking it beneath her skin and slicing the tattoo away like she would an orange peel. "No," he says again, and he fights her, holds her down with her shoulders flat against the floor and tells her he's not going anywhere until she listens.

"Why do I have to have this?" Lyme struggles, but he's bigger and stronger and knows her better than she knows herself and she can't budge him. "I hate it! I don't want to look at it anymore!"

"You have it because it's a reminder," he says, and Lyme snorts and turns her head away. He turns her back with a finger against her cheek. "Don't snort at me, little girl, this is important. It's a reminder of who made you and who can unmake you."

Lyme closes her eyes, and he lets her. "What do I do?" she asks, her voice sticking in her throat. "I can't wash it away."

"No, you can't," he says. He's not talking about the ink and neither is she. "But what you do is become a mentor. Each kid that goes in and doesn't come out, that's your penance. Each one that does, that's one brick in the road to redemption."

That's cold comfort, but Lyme swallows. "How far does the road go?"

"Forever," he says, and he kisses her on the forehead. "Until your last heartbeat, darlin', that's what we swore and that's what we do. But we claw back a little of what we can each time we bring one back."

Lyme sags, and he lets her up and wraps a broad arm around her shoulders. "Can I wear long sleeves?" she asks finally, leaning her head against his shoulder.

"Yeah, that, that's fine. You can wear whatever you want. Nobody said you gotta flaunt it." He works his fingers into her hair. "Get dressed, I'll take you clothes shopping."

Lyme doesn't move. Fourteen corpses feeding the soil because of her; knock off the criminals the Centre used for her kill tests, that's still ten kids. Even if Lyme mentors every year she can for as long as her body can take it, even if she pulls a miracle once out of every three kids who go in - more than any mentor in history - she'll still never repay that debt. And even if she did, for every kid she saves that's twenty-three others gone, including one of their own. It's hopeless. It's hopeless, yet certainty builds in Lyme's chest until she all but burns with it, that it might mean nothing but she's going to mentor until the day she dies anyway.

"Listen," her mentor says, and he squeezes her shoulder. "Lemme tell you a story about a kid from Four who threw a starfish back into the sea."

It's a silly story, but as the years pass she thinks of it every time a tribute's blood splashes the camera lens and the cannon fires, every time she stays awake in the Control Room for weeks on end while her brain buzzes with stimulants and the backs of her eyelids itch. For the times when she sits next to the broken remnants of what was once a beautiful, laughing child and dips her hands in their blood, untangles their twisted psyches around her fingers and begins to weave them back together into something resembling human.

_It matters to this one_, said the boy in the story as he tossed a starfish back into the ocean. In the end, Lyme saves only a handful - still more than almost any other mentor but not enough, never enough - but she clings to them anyway, her Victors, and each one keeps the darkness at bay a little longer. _You matter_, she thinks as she holds them, fights them, pins them down and weathers the worst they know to throw at her. _You matter to me_.


	2. Chapter 2: Districts 3, 4, 7, 8

**Chapter 2: Districts 3, 4, 7, 8**

* * *

**Beetee**

He's always thought a little too much, a little too deep. As a boy, Beetee took apart every piece of electronics in the house; his parents used to yell at him until they noticed that when he put them back together they ran faster, smoother, cooler. By the time he was five years old, they were giving him things to fix, to improve. By ten, his father's repair shop was one of the best in the district, and no one knows that most of the enhancements come at the hands of a boy who needs to stand on a box to reach the surface of his workbench.

He loves computers; they don't have any in his home - too expensive, like most of the things that Three manufactures and exports to the Capitol - but he gets to play with them when they get brought into the shop. Beetee loves to take them apart and stare at the workings, at the metal and wire that come together to create machines that can think and draw and calculate.

He likes watches, too. He takes the backs off and stares at them, how the cogs move and the pieces tick, and he pokes at the little spinning bit with his finger and it flutters against his thumbnail like the tiniest of hummingbirds.

People are like clocks and computers, once you know how to look, and Beetee figures it out young. He knows what to say to his parents to make them give him what they want; studies his classmates so he can manipulate them for fun; phrases his answers to the teachers so they pay attention to him in all the right ways and ignore him in others.

He watches the Hunger Games the same as the rest of them, and no one says it, but Beetee knows that this is broken, this is wrong. This doesn't make sense. The cogs are the wrong size, the hand that winds the watch too clumsy; it's a computer running overclocked with mismatched pieces and giant lumps of solder on the motherboard. Sooner or later the whole thing is going to explode in the hands of the people who've built it. He wonders how the Capitol can be so stupid. He wonders how the people in his district don't see it.

Beetee is Reaped for the Games when he's fifteen, but he's not afraid. It's a problem like any other, and Beetee is old enough to understand how things work, the tangled mass of wires that is the Gamemakers, the trainers, the sponsors, the audience. And so he gets his tools, dives in, and arranges the gears to his liking.

He plays smart for the Gamemakers when the other tributes aren't looking; when they are he plays up the eccentricity, spending all his time at the useless stations, camouflage and hammock-making and weaving. By the end of training they all think he's crazy; the Careers slide their gazes right over him as though he doesn't exist, neither marking him as an easy bloodbath kill or as a threat to be taken out. For his private session with the Gamemakers he builds a cage and fills it with a current so strong it sets the dummy inside on fire.

He runs from the Cornucopia once the countdown hits zero, circles back that night when the Pack is out hunting and collects his prize, enough wire and electronics to electrify the entire field by the Cornucopia. Beetee finds the closest camera and smiles.

Beetee finishes his trap on day ten, but he waits. He's good at waiting, at pretending. He builds smaller contraptions to catch food to eat, fashions a makeshift cooking plate so he doesn't have to deal with charred-outside raw-inside meat. One day another tribute stumbles on his hiding place, and Beetee kills him with a taser he made himself. The sponsors send him a rubber mat. Someone in his district must be paying attention.

It's nearly three weeks in when the Gamemakers announce the feast at the Cornucopia, and that morning the sky opens up and pours down with rain. It's a gift to him as sure as the glittering swords the Careers get, and Beetee will not waste his chance. He hides inside the Cornucopia, the rubber mat firmly beneath his feet, and he waits until the last of the tributes appear before he sets off his plan.

The Arena smells like barbecued pork as the hovercraft lands to pick him up.

He'd feel guilt, but guilt is impractical. Guilt would make his hands shake, would waste the food he eats as he vomits it up later, would keep him awake at night because there are screams behind his eyelids. Beetee does not feel guilt. If his hands tremble, if he throws up his meals, if he can't sleep, it must be the physical strain of recovery. Brain chemistry, post-adrenaline letdown, the rigours of starvation, that's all it is. That's all it is.

One year later, Beetee spends every minute he possibly can with his tributes, two bright young children with enough potential to see this through. He might not be a Career, but he knows the system, can teach them how to pull the strings. He plans, he plots, he schemes, and with them creates a perfect plan to get at least one of them through. It can't fail.

It can't fail. It can't. Not until approximately sixteen seconds into the Games, when the boy from Two kills Jessamine with an axe to her spine - she keeps twitching even after she's gone, electrical impulses in the brain confused by the messages her severed nerves are sending, appropriate somehow for a Three. Not until approximately thirty seconds after that, when the girl from One sends a knife flying after Carmine and skewers him between the eyes.

Beetee has never failed before. He's never found a system he can't work around, odds he can't manipulate in his favour. And yet he does, again and again, year after year and decade after decade.

He learns that failure tastes bitter, like the stimulants he crunched as the timer went off in anticipation of days on end without sleep, like the sour dregs of the coffee he downed that was more grounds than water, like the copper tang of blood. It smells like the burnt-hair aftertaste of an electrical fire. It sounds like the wet, broken scream of a twelve-year-old boy as his throat is crushed enough to kill him, but not quickly. It looks like the dull brown of a burnt-out lightbulb, like wide-open eyes that stare at nothing, like the twist of limbs at unnatural angles. It feels like dry heaving long after the contents of his stomach renewed their acquaintance on the white porcelain tiles of his shower.

The price of genius is arrogance. Beetee has enough genius for five men and arrogance for seven, and a price large enough that it takes twenty-eight years and fifty-six deaths before he finally atones.

* * *

**Wiress**

The thing about machines is that they're simple. It's all just clockwork, electronics, wiring and conduits and tiny pieces that just need someone to fit them together. She's not building a trap, a death machine, not planning to electrocute a bunch of kids, most of whom are only in there with her for the same reason Wiress is, that their names happened to grace the slip of paper that stuck to someone's fingers. It's easier to push the other tributes from her mind completely, and so she does.

She's hungry, exhausted, her nerves run ragged because there's almost nothing to eat and nowhere safe to sleep. Wiress is used to late nights at least; she broke into the laboratory of a different college every night after hours and tinkered with the equipment until it was time for the morning shift, when she slipped out through a window and scurried back to her family's apartment. It's easier to pretend this is just another night in the lab conducting experiments, and so she does.

She rations the energy bars in her pack, a few bites a day, just enough to keep her moving. She designs and builds and they don't stop her, she assumes because she looks mad, because her mentor plays it down - he must, or she'd be getting sponsor gifts for her innovation and she only received one parachute and that held a soldering iron and nothing else - and she immerses herself in the challenge without focusing on the application. It's easier to ignore the intent of what she's building, and so she does.

It works. Wiress turns the whole twisting maze of tunnels into a gigantic conduit for electricity, and she fries the rest of the tributes in a single flash while she hides in an insulated nest that took her three days to build. By the time she puts her plan in action there are only six left, and when it's over there's only one. Quick and efficient, though she has to step over one of them to get to the hovercraft and not even the announcers could call it clean. It's easier to tell herself they would be dead one way or another, and so she does.

She mentors along with Beetee, but there are no more geniuses among the children who go to die. She and her fellow victor were the bright lights in a city of mediocrity; as much as people think, not everyone from their district is a fiend with electricity. Most can tinker, but few have the determination and motivation to make it through. Most don't make it past the bloodbath; many can't even pass their interviews without sobbing. It's easier to think of them as already dead, broken clockwork that will soon get swept up and put away, and so she does.

Years pass, children perish and the Capitol feeds on their blood. It's easier to lose her mind, and so she does.

* * *

**Annie**

It nearly kills her, knowing that Finnick promised to take double the number of clients in the Capitol to keep Annie safe from being a victor-whore, every time he comes back to District 4 with edgy movements and his skin scrubbed clean, every time it takes him a day before he'll crawl back in bed with her and let her hold him. It rips her in two to know he's right to do it, that whatever her strengths Annie could not survive what he goes through night after night, that if she had to do it they would find her in her room with a rope around her neck before the month had passed.

What infuriates her is that he thinks she doesn't know.

Annie lost her mind when her district partner lost his head, and just like they sewed it back onto his neck for the funeral, she's had the best psychiatrists that money can, but they can't put her back together again and erase the cracks completely. The problem is she's not sure she wants to. No one can change if they don't want to change, they tell her, and for Annie reality is too sharp, too jagged, like running her hand over broken glass and expecting it not to cut. Being declared insane gives her a buffer, like the blanket forts she used to build to protect herself when thunder rolled over the water and whipped the sea into a frenzy. Eventually the doctors shake their heads, and Annie knows just what Finnick does to make sure she gets these sessions - it's Finnick's money, paid for by hands on his chest and lips on his neck and perfume clinging to his skin - so she cuts them off.

The others talk about poor, mad Annie Cresta like she's not in the room, and Annie sits and rocks back and forth and pretends she can't hear them while the anger boils up inside her. She could correct them; she could tell Finnick she knows exactly why he has to visit the Capitol so often, but she doesn't. Anger might be poison, might be draining like starvation and dehydration and exhaustion, but she doesn't care; anger might be the thing she's supposed to let go of, but she can't. She doesn't want to. For better or worse, anger is clear, anger is strong, and it doesn't drag her down or fill her head with wool. Anger is what keeps her sane, for Finnick's sake. For her own.

When Annie is angry, she remembers who she is. Finnick calls them her lucid moments; what he doesn't know is that these are the times she most often wants to throw herself at him and scratch her nails right down his face.

Finnick loves his broken, damaged Annie - he gets to keep his secrets, and every time she smiles he gets to feel like he's doing something good, like he's won a day off from his life sentence of guilt and misery - and so Annie lets him think that's all she is.

It's not forever. One day Finnick will be too old to hold their interest anymore; there will be other victors, younger, prettier, fresher victors, to tempt the Capitol and whet their appetites, and he'll be free. He'll come home to her, no more secrets, no more obligations, and that day Annie will repay them both by slipping off the mask and showing him he helped piece her back together after all. It will hurt, but they can suck the poison from the wound together, and their relationship will be the stronger for it.

It will be years from now - unlikely they'll let him go before he's thirty - but luckily for the both of them, Annie's always been good at treading water.

* * *

**Finnick**

To hear them talk, you'd think Finnick won his Games by smiling at the other tributes until they dropped dead from his charm.

Finnick won his Games with as much stealth and skill as he did violence, but the end the other tributes didn't murder themselves. He drowned them, netted them, speared them, bled them, and when the golden trident floated down on its silver parachute, Finnick had never seen anything so beautiful. Not the brightest sunset over the ocean in District Four, not the flash of scales as a school of fish darted below his boat in the clear blue water, not the stars shimmering bright over the bobbing orange lights of the boats in the harbour. He drove it into the chest of the girl from Two until her sternum snapped and her ribcage sprang open; the blood hit his face in a hot wet spray, and Finnick had never felt so alive.

Games-crazy, they call it. A way for the brain to cope after it crosses that line that no decent human ever should, when said decent human has no choice. Most victors give over to hysterical, screeching laughter by the end, painting their faces with the lifeblood of the teenagers who breathed their last in front of them. It's a way to explain away the lust and drive to take the others down that grips so many, the ones who don't win by chance, by accident, the ones who claw victory from the mangled bodies of the others. A way to humanize the ones who left humanity behind them. An excuse so that the victors don't get rounded up and put down, so their therapists can whisper some comfort, cold though it may be, into their ears as they curl up on their sofas and cry into the cushions.

Most die when they enter the Arena. Finnick died when he left. He died when he traded the golden boy with a grin like a shark and the hands of a butcher for the one with an angel's smile and a lover's fingers. When that boy, who'd speared another boy through the heart and pulled the still-beating organ from his chest, was ordered by the President to kneel in front of a man who couldn't run up a flight of stairs without gasping, to let that man twist fat fingers in his hair and tell him exactly what to do.

Some of the others - outliers mostly, the ones big enough and pretty enough to maintain interest - get called in for Arena games by masochists who want to know the thrill without the mortal danger. No one ever books Finnick for those sorts of evenings. The women run their manicured nails through his copper hair and coo over how soft it is, but they never remember how it looked matted through with dirt and blood and seaweed.

Finnick fulfills their fantasies and steals their secrets with the same hands that wrapped a loop of rope around the One girl's neck and pulled until she stopped fighting. At night he dreams of the Arena, not in fear and terror but in longing, yearning for the last time in his life he had power, the last time he held his life in his own hands, the last time any decision he made was up to him. He wakes with his head aching and his cheeks soaked in frustrated tears because he will never, ever have that kind of agency again, then rolls over and checks his messages for tonight's assignment.

* * *

**Mags**

"You're joking."

The Mayor of District 4 holds the keys to the city, but only one person in this room drove a fishhook up another teenager's nose and into his brain. Only one has dragged a knife across another's throat and felt the flesh give, so like cleaning a fish yet completely not. Only one has since taken eight children under her wing, learned their names, heard their fears, given them weapons, and watched them die.

Mags says nothing. She doesn't have to. The room falls silent, the kind that crawls with discomfort. The Mayor clears his throat and tries again, though he adopts a more respectful tone this time. "I just mean, you honestly want us to turn our children into them? Those monsters?"

She expected this. Districts 1 and 2 have flexed their privilege yet again, and rumour has it they've begun special, secret academies to train children in preparation for the Games. The past three years, each of the tributes from those districts have been volunteers, hale and beautiful, with just a touch too much knowledge of the cameras and how to play the crowd, and one of them has won each time.

Any fisherman in District 4 knows how to read the wind and the waves, to feel the shift in humidity and scent the rain, to sense a storm before the clouds roll in and the sea begins to churn. Mags smells it now in these young, strong tributes with their sharp-toothed smiles, the roar of approval from the crowds at the interviews, the way the mentors from One and Two now have an invisible line in the sand around them. The Games are changing. It's the stillness of the wind before the hurricane, and now it's District 4's chance to board up the windows or stand on the beach and be washed away.

"The Capitol is bored of terrified children who take weeks to finish incompetently slaughtering each other," Mags says, enjoying the way they flinch at her words. So sensitive, these civilians. They don't know the life she's known. They've seen the sacrifices she made to stand here, and yet they speak to her of horrors. "They keep introducing new elements. First it was the sponsors." A way of ensuring that audience favourites had their chance to win, even if the Gamemakers and their scores didn't always agree with popular opinion. "Now it's these children. The ones with the edge."

Eight children, Mags has sent to their deaths, unprepared but for the handful of days with weapons they've never handled, even if she talks to them of poison, of craft and cleverness and stealth, though she tells them to look for tools they're familiar with, harpoons and hooks and serrated daggers like they'd use to scoop the guts from a fish with a flick of the wrist. Eight children, and countless more ahead of her.

"It's early," Mags says when no one speaks. She's nineteen years old but feels ninety. "The system is still in flux. Now is the time to act, before the rules gets set in stone. We're in the position to help our children survive. We don't have the resources for a full-fledged academy with recruitment like in the inner districts -" not officially, of course, but as a mentor Mags sees and hears things to which normal citizens are not privy - "but we could do what we can. We can give all our children the basics in handling things like harpoons and spears. We can make them strong. And for those who wish it, we can offer them more specialized training. It won't guarantee a victory every year, but we can give them hope. We can take away the helplessness."

The Mayor shakes his head. "But at what cost? What would we be moulding them into?"

Mags fixes him with a hard stare, lets him look and search for the Arena behind her eyes. "Are you a father, Mr. Mayor?" she asks him. His gaze skitters away. "I didn't think so. This is the reality of our choice. The children coming of age now have never known anything but the Games; this will be their whole lives, them and every child born hereafter. We can save their souls, or we can save their lives. I move that we ask the parents which they'd rather keep."

The Council sits in silence until Muriel sits up straight, and everyone leans back to let her speak. She's an Elder, one of the few who escaped the mass executions following the Dark Days because she hid her involvement too well. Mags' heart flutters in her chest. "My granddaughter," she says slowly. "If she were chosen, I would want her to have the best chance I could give her, for her to know I had done everything in my power to help her. I would want her to be more than chum in the water." She turns to Mags, her watery gaze pinning her to her seat as surely as any harpoon. "I would want her to be unafraid."

The vote falls 21-14 in favour of instituting a volunteer training program. It's Mags' job, when she's next in the Capitol, to sell it, to promise a better showing - handsomer, deadlier tributes, a more exciting game - in exchange for the necessary funding and elision of the government's gaze on this particular area. She delivers her proposal the next week and receives the go-ahead. Preparations begin the following month.

In eight years' time, Mags stands upon the stage with Calypso, tanned and beautiful and proud, dressed in a gown of seafoam and wearing a crown made of gold and forged in blood. Elder Muriel walks up the stairs and places a wreath of pearls and sea glass in her granddaughter's hands. Calypso's eyes glitter in the sun. "I dedicate this win to my family and my district," she says in a clear, ringing voice, and those gathered burst into thunderous applause.

_For what shall it profit a man_, asked one of the old books, destroyed in the Rebirth (as the Capitol calls it - the Purge, say those who have the courage, or perhaps madness, to do so) and forbidden, but Mags was there and she remembers, _if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?_

Mags looks at the girl who traded dolls for daggers, gauzy ribbons for garrottes, who stands tall and proud and alive; at the audience who weeps for her; at the children who do not fear because of her. She thinks of holding Calypso through her nightmares, that first morning when she tried to drive a knife into Mags' eye when her mentor awoke her for breakfast. She thinks of innocence lost, and another sixty years gained.

_Everything_, Mags thinks, sure as a fishhook in her skin. Let the others keep their principles. She would rather keep her children.

* * *

**Blight**

Blight was an accident; his name, deliberate.

He learns to fight because he has to, because it's jeers and well-aimed kicks at school, snarls and bottles at his head at home. He learns that knowing how to take a punch is just as important as throwing one back. He learns you never tuck your thumb inside your fist unless you want it broken. He learns that crying is the worst kind of suicide.

He hurls axes into trees because the trees don't scream, because he can do it again and again and again and picture a face on the trunk long after an actual body would be nothing but pulp and his ass hauled away by Peacekeepers to be executed or sent to the graphite mines or whatever they'd do with underage murderers.

Except there is a place for someone with a lot of rage and frustration and desperation and humiliation, isn't there. A way for someone like him to dig out every last dark, ugly secret inside him and fling it out for everyone to see without a single consequence, other than the one that takes them all in the end anyway.

If Blight stays, one day he'll save up enough money to get away, maybe find himself a tiny shack somewhere and make a living cutting down trees even though they've industrialized in most of the district to keep up with their quotas. If he's lucky one day he'll stop feeling helpless and impotent and afraid.

If he goes, maybe he can scratch the itch that's built up inside him since he got his first split lip at the age of three; since he was seven and decided to stay out late after school doing absolutely nothing because every other day his old man always smacked him around and said he 'knew what Blight did' just to cover his bases, so it may as well be for something.

If he goes, it will all be over, and at least he'll get a few good hits in before the end. That's more than he can say for here.

Every year he prays that his name will come up in the Reaping, but it never does. Then Blight is eighteen years old and it's his last chance and the name they call is one he's never heard before, and before he knows it, District 7 has its first volunteer in all of Panem's history. Three weeks after he takes the stage, Blight gives his district another first.

He tells the people who had the cheek to pop out a kid and name him after a disease to go fuck themselves when they show up at his shiny new mansion, and for a few weeks Blight sleeps well. But then he heads outside for a walk one day and passes a tour group from home, come to gawk at his house in the empty Village and say they knew him when he was a wee thing. They like to do that, tell the part where they always knew he was a strong boy, a fighter, and not talk about the part where they saw him wearing long sleeves in the middle of August and flinching when anyone touched his shoulder, saw and never did a damned thing.

He hears one of them whisper that it looks like he really is Burt's boy after all, and everything crashes down like a giant oak felled by a hundred tiny hatchets.

From that day on he's never alone when he sleeps. The faces haunt his dreams, hiss in his ear and ask him if it's worth it, ask him how it feels to be his daddy's son. He looks in the mirror and sees his old man's eyes, his square jaw and crooked nose, sees his anger tightening the corners of his mouth. Finally Blight can't take it anymore, and he takes a train all the way across the district to find the liquor shack near where he grew up, walks in at three in the morning and greets the man behind the counter.

"How's it goin' Hank," Blight says, easy as you please, like he didn't walk out on his hometown and everyone in it the day he stepped onto that stage and never looked back. "Gimme a case of the old man's favourite."

He takes the first train back, cracks open a bottle and stares at it for a good hour as the sun creeps through the trees and throws jagged pine shadows on the floor. At last he shrugs, places the glass against his teeth and drains it in one go. You know what they say. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Blight killed five kids, but he never spawns a single one to suffer under the kind of father he fears he's programmed to be. By his math, that puts him square.

* * *

**Johanna**

Some nights Johanna buries a hatchet in the President's chest. Simple, elegant in a brutish sort of way. He collapses to his knees, eyes wide with shock, and blood bubbles out of his mouth. He scrabbles at the handle but can't pull it out. Johanna strides forward, pushes him over with a foot against his shoulder so he lands on his back. She takes bets with herself whether the wound will kill him before he chokes on his own blood.

Other nights she hangs him by his feet and slits his throat, lets him bleed out like they do the chickens in the outer districts because it makes them taste better. He tries to hold the gaping cut shut but it hangs open like a second smile, curved and wicked, and the blood trickles up his chin and face and soaks his white hair.

Others she pins him down with a spike in each hand and foot, slices him open from pelvis to jawbone, peels back the skin and saws through the bones. She pulls him apart the way he pulled her life apart and flings the pieces as far as she can throw them.

Still other nights she drives a knife into the softest parts of his body. "That's for my mother," she says, thrusting the dagger into his eye as it squelches like a peeled grape. She does it again with the other - "That's for my father." She punctures his bowels and the insides spill out, the foul stench thick in the air like the time Dad took her hunting and she messed up while field dressing the deer. "That's for my brother." Then one last strike down through his groin as he screams and writhes and sobs for mercy. "That's for my little sister, you son of a bitch!"

Every night her family runs to her. Johanna takes them in her arms, pets her sister's hair, chucks her brother under the chin, squeezes her parents close and breathes in Dad's aftershave, Mom's perfume. "It's okay," she tells them. "It's okay. He's dead. I saved you."

Every morning she wakes alone, and the only blood beneath her fingernails is her own. Johanna treats the scratches on her arms, her throat, her cheeks, ignoring the sting of iodine as it seeps into the shallow cuts. She stares at the girl in the mirror and makes her the same promise she makes every morning: one day she'll do it in the daytime. One day she'll do it with her eyes open. One day she'll make him pay for real, and when she closes her eyes and opens them his blood will still be on the floor.

One day. One day.

* * *

**Cecelia**

The rural districts have different ideas about life after death - all of them forbidden, of course, but some things are harder to control than lives and laws and money. In Seven, people believe that if you plant a tree over a person's grave, their spirit is reborn in the seedling and they live forever in the branches, in the wind in the leaves. Soul trees are marked with red ribbon around the trunk so that even in the harshest winter they will never be used as timber. In Ten it's the opposite; bodies should be burned, for if they're buried the worms crawl into the body and take pieces of the soul with them, and the dead are forever fractured, always seeking the way back together. It's the reason why worms gather where there's dead, seeking out their soul-shards in the bodies of their brethren.

It's sweet, in a quaint sort of way, but District Eight has no such customs, it being a sprawl of ramshackle slum-dwellings and ugly factories that spew out industrial fumes. No greenery here, no nature to touch the minds and inspire the people to weave tales about their dead. The only thing they weave is cloth, and they cremate their dead because there's no room for anything else.

Cecelia heard the stories the same as any other child in Eight, told in whispers while the machinery thrummed to cover their chatter, in disbelieving giggles. What funny things other people believe. People in Eight are realistic and have no need for children's stories in order to make themselves feel better about everyday facts of life.

She understands the appeal a little better now. Cecelia poisoned three people to earn the right to come back to her district; she can't eat now without testing all her food, and most of her victor stipend goes not toward beautiful clothes or furnishings but for portable tox kits so she never has to fear. She marries a man who loves to cook because she can't anymore, can't even sift flour without imagining the ratio of poison to make it a lethal dose, and barely trusts herself to heat up leftovers.

Cecelia and David have three children. When their first is born and Cecelia tells him the name she chose, he looks at her with wide eyes. "Cici no," he says, and he touches her cheek. "You don't have to do this."

"Yes, I do." Cecelia looks down at the tiny, wrinkly, red-faced infant in her arms, wailing and furious and so, so alive, and she strokes one finger down the side of his face and whispers the name of the first boy who choked on cyanide.

No one ever remembers the ones who died. People ask Cecelia why she chose to have children, but never where their names come from, never why three and only three. They joke about the interruption it must have on her getting any rest, and only David knows that she doesn't once sleep through the night until her third is born, safe and healthy and squalling. "Not this time," she says to them as they sleep, stroking her hand over their soft curls. "Never again."

Reincarnation isn't real, Cecilia is a murderer, and she can't guarantee any of the promises she whispers to her children in the dark, but that's the thing about surviving the Games. For the first time she realizes that an ugly truth isn't always superior to a beautiful lie.

* * *

**Woof**

He was a weaver. As a child he used to sit with Mama, a tangle of thread and yarn in his lap, and wind the strands together on a loom made out of scraps of wood she'd gathered from back alleys and nailed together herself. He wove blankets and tapestries in bright colours, working with cloth his neighbours brought home from the factories; the smallest kids worked to clear out the machines, crawling in behind the large cogs and pistons to pull out the strings that got tangled around the inner workings. They would stuff the pieces in their dresses and bring them home to him.

Their apartment was small, and dingy, but had the prettiest furnishings in the whole tenement. Mama used to tell him he had a talent. And then came the Reaping, and none of that mattered anymore.

He won his Games by weaving nets, by wrapping ropes around the throats of sleeping tributes and pulling until their breath stopped, and when he ran out of rope he used his hands. Woof crawls out of the Arena with his guts trying to tumble out of his stomach, and even after they put it back and sew him up and proclaim him fixed, his hands won't stop shaking. His mother gives him a handful of yarn to keep him busy, and where his fingers used to dance the strands free of knots, now it all ends in a snarl worse than before.

He tries to weave, but his hands always tremble. He can't thread the loom, and the shuttle slips out of his hands and clatters to the floor instead of flying across the strings. He begs his hands to listen but they won't, not anymore.

One night, his mother wakes him from a nightmare - he's trapped in a half-finished tapestry, the strands curling around him like spiderwebs, and every one is a bright, bright horrible red that stains him with leftover dye - and when he comes to himself he has her on the floor, his fingers around her throat. Those same fingers that shiver and shake and cramp when he tries to work the threads are strong and firm now as they crush the air from her windpipe. He can't unlock them. He can't make them stop. After she stops moving and kicking and coughing and twitching it still takes him over an hour to wrench his fingers open. He tries to lift her but his hands are useless again and she drops to the ground.

Later he cries, rocks himself in the corner. It's days before he can call anyone to get her.


	3. Chapter 3: Districts 11 & 12

**Chapter 3: Districts 11 & 12**

* * *

**Chaff**

"Come back to me," Rosie says, her voice a fierce whisper, her breath hot against his neck. Her fingers curl around the back of his neck, slide into his hair. "I don't care what you have to do. Just come back. I love you."

Chaff doesn't say anything, because she doesn't love him and they both know it, but it would be rude to point it out now. He just holds her, maps the curve of her spine with his palm, and lets her hiss desperate promises into his collarbone. He's not sure how to answer her or what she wants him to say; they've only been together three weeks. It wasn't that serious, just something to pass the time when they weren't working. He's only seventeen, Rosie's not even that. They were going to give it a month and then see how it went from there, but they have - had - their whole lives in front of them.

It was just supposed to be a bit of fun, a way to get through the Reaping and Games-month. Not this.

"I will," Chaff says finally. He gives her a smile that says they both know he won't - she goes to kiss him and he goes to kiss her but not at the same time and so they don't - and she leaves with a perfect tragic story that will set her up in lover's infamy for the rest of her life once he dies.

Except he doesn't die, does he. There's a scythe in the Cornucopia and Seeder told Chaff not to try for it, she told him to run in the opposite direction and just wait them out, wait like she did until the others finish themselves off, but it's right there. It's right there and it's shiny and only a handful of the kids in the Arena this year could even lift it, let alone swing it. Chaff's the best in his rotation, the only one the foremen have never had to use the whip on. They talk about him like he's some kind of trained animal for it but they're still proud of him - like a pet owner is of a dog who can shake hands, or maybe a hunter his finest pointer - and he knows how to use a scythe.

And so Chaff runs, and he gets the weapon, and on the way out he runs into the boy from One. He's big and pretty but Chaff's bigger, and they stare at each other for a long second before the One Boy snarls "Later, Eleven," and darts off to slit a little girl's throat. The others ignore him, and Chaff's mind blanks for a good five seconds - forever in the Arena, three kids go down while he stares - which means he should be dead, he should be more than dead, someone should have stuck a sword in his back long ago but they're focusing on the weaker ones and it hits him that they think he's too much of a threat to deal with now.

He got an 8 in training because he's big and threw some things around and pointed out a few plants he doesn't plan on eating, but the Careers don't know that, do they, and so he runs.

The Arena is filled with horror and murder and the Hunger Games are twisted like they always are, but the thing is. The thing is.

He's good at it.

He might not have years of training like the Careers, he might not have had a good, full meal in his life before coming to the Capitol and scarfing down everything they put on the table, he might be from the second-shittiest district in all of Panem, but he's good at it. Chaff used to steal food from the warehouse to feed his family when the tesserae ran out, and he might be big but he's quiet and he knows how to move. He knows how to use a scythe. He knows how to blend in with the darkness and how to step without making a sound. Days pass and he survives.

Seeder told him to hide and so he does, but it rankles inside him. He's cowering like an animal and the Careers are out there. They're out there and they're killing kids and they're laughing about it, and he doesn't care if they were trained or born or how they ended up the way they are, kids are dead and that's all that matters. He's in a tree when they catch up to the girl from Nine, and she's fourteen and she offers them all the food in her pack and they laugh at her and say they're going to take it anyway and then they take a long time to kill her. Chaff watches and the rage builds up inside him, and he knows this feeling. He knows it because he's felt it before when the foreman took a whip to a kid who wasn't picking fast enough, when the rest of them turned their eyes down to their work and pretended not to hear the whistle of the cord through the air and the screams of the boy as he begged someone to help him.

Chaff couldn't do anything then because it would just be worse for both of them, but there is no worse now.

Turns out when you're dead anyway, there are no consequences.

Chaff creeps into the Career camp one night, a strip of cloth from his sleeve tied over his face to hide the whites of his eyes, and he slits the throat of the boy from Two as he sleeps. He melts back into the shadows before Two finishes thrashing, and if the others wake up and look it doesn't matter because they don't find him. They look the next day but they don't find him then either, and when the Anthem plays the next night and DISTRICT TWO, MALE's face flashes in the sky, something digs itself in Chaff's gut and twists, dark and satisfied. It feels like the first time he stole an apple and went the whole day with it hidden in his shirt; by the time he bit into it, the skin was bruised and the flesh brown and soft, but it didn't matter. It tasted like an open window and a warm summer breeze. For once, an outlier is biting back.

He stalks the Careers. He waits, just like Seeder told him, but he follows them, and every few days he kills another. The alliance splinters after the second - nobody knows which one and they all suspect each other and there's only one winner anyway right - and that just makes it easier. The Careers finish off the rest of the remaining tributes over the next week, wanting to end it as soon as possible, and that means Chaff never has to make that call, never has to cross that line and kill someone who didn't deserve it. If they were smart they would've left one for him and forced him to do it, but they're impatient to finish. Or maybe the trained monsters don't realize that other people might hesitate, since to them everyone is meat and it don't matter how long it's been aged.

It's comes down to him and the girl from Four. Chaff doesn't remember most of the fight later, just that it took him three tries to pull the scythe free and it doesn't click with him that he's done, that he's won it, even after the trumpets peal and the announcer comes over the loudspeaker to tell him. He keeps whirling, looking for the next threat, and there's something on the ground, brown and soft and soaked with red, and then a wave of dizziness knocks him sideways. He tries to brace himself with his hands against the ground except he can't, and it's not because he's exhausted but because he doesn't have _hands_, he has _hand_, singular, and he's staring at the other one in the grass in front of him. It's not until he's on the hovercraft with the attendants pulling him toward a room full of IVs and beeping machines, pressing some kind of special pressure bandage to the tump of his wrist, that it sinks in what happened.

They bring him home a hero, District 11's first male Victor in the entire 45 years of the Games, and only the second ever. He hasn't slept properly in weeks, and all Chaff wants to do is find his family and bring them to the big new house, and then maybe he'll go find Rosie. She asked him to come back and he did, and it doesn't matter if neither of them thought he'd make it, he did and that has to be worth a million boyfriend points. How many of the others back home could say they went through the Arena for her?

Well. Not for her. Truth is, Chaff didn't think about Rosie once in the Arena, tried not to think of home at all so it wouldn't get tainted by all the blood and gore, but once he's on the train he can't stop. Her golden eyes, the wicked curve of her lips when she'd smile at him and crook her finger before leading him to the apple shed. The soft feel of her skin beneath his hands, warm and slick with sweat - not blood - as they lay tangled together on a pile of burlap sacks spread across the floor.

Except there are parties and dinners and meetings with the mayor and the bigwigs in the central district city, and it's days before Chaff makes it home. And even then 'home' isn't home anymore, it's the Victor's Village and that's on the far side of the district entirely, so it's another few days before he figures out how to call and ask for visitors.

When Rosie finally shows up, she doesn't take her shoes off, even though they're dusty from the road, and she shies away when Chaff reaches for her. He has a new hand now, sort of, it's a clumsy metal thing and he's still learning how to pick things up with it, but the doctors say his brain will reconnect with the pathways soon enough. For now he just has to be careful not to hold anything he doesn't want crushed.

They stare at each other, and this isn't the reunion Chaff wanted. He's seventeen and exhausted and he's killed five people - if Careers count as people, they don't really, but even if they're only half a real person that's still five half-people - and he wants surety. He wants the promise he forgot about but which now etches itself into his skin.

"I saw you kill them," Rosie says, and he looks into her eyes and sees the deaths all over again, reflected in the horror in her expression. "That last girl, you - it was like you weren't you anymore. It wasn't supposed to be like this."

Chaff still hasn't slept, even though the bed in the new house is nicer than any he's ever slept in. He keeps tearing himself awake, feeling invisible fingers at his throat, imagining weapons sliding between his ribs. He sees killers in the shadows everywhere, and he's still not convinced he's wrong.

"How'd you expect me to win?" Chaff demands, his voice hoarse in his throat. "You told me to come back."

"Not like this," she says, and he and Rosie used to fight, that's how they started this because she looks so damn hot when she's angry, but it's not like that now. Her eyes are wide and scared instead of hard and snapping with fury, and instead of balling her fists or cocking her hip at him she's curled in like she expects him to hit her. "I don't know - I was stupid, but not like this. I can't, Chaff. I'd be afraid forever, and that's not fair to you."

Right. You'd think winning the Hunger Games would save a guy the 'it's not you, it's me' speech, but apparently the odds are never in his favour. "Fine," Chaff says, and when he takes a deep breath to calm himself all he smells is blood and soot, and so he turns away.

Fifteen years later, Rosie's little boy Joshua stands in front of Chaff on the Reaping Stage. Rosie grabs Chaff after the ceremony, pulls him into an alcove, and she still smells the same, damn her, like oranges and cinnamon, and Chaff hasn't known the touch of a good woman since she left him. The giggling Capitol bits of fluff he picks up when the urge gets too bad don't hardly count.

"I was wrong," she hisses, her eyes desperate. "What I said to you, about not wanting it like this, I was wrong. Do whatever you can. Tell him to do whatever he can. I just want him home."

Chaff lives alone now. His ma and little brothers moved out after the night Solomon tried to crawl in bed with Chaff after a nightmare like he used to do, and Chaff knocked him halfway across the room. He hasn't seen them since. "You sure about that?" he asks her. She looks at him, face pinched, and doesn't answer.

Not that it matters anyway. Thirty seconds in, the boy from Two twists Joshua's head halfway off his shoulders.

"I'm out too," says Haymitch Abernathy, throwing his headset across the room as first his girl, then his boy, go down in a spray of blood. "Chaff, drinks?"

"It's like you read my mind," Chaff says, flinging an arm about Haymitch's shoulder. If there's any justice in the world, after the third or fourth he'll stop tasting bile on every swallow.

* * *

**Seeder**

The year after her win, both tributes are under sixteen. They look at her with wide eyes as the train rushes through the orchards, and in their faces she sees nothing but questions she can't answer, hope she can't fulfill, and fear she can only exacerbate. Seeder is only seventeen years old, and they expect her to save these children.

Except not really. Nobody expects her to save anyone; her win was a fluke, and she knows that better than anyone. If the Gamemakers had decided to make the quirk of the Arena anything other than the lack of food, she would not be sitting here with her back against the plush leather one year later. Seeder is the first Victor to be crowned without a single kill to her name, the only one who got her victory through nothing but unlucky circumstance.

The Capitol audiences are bored of her, the quiet girl with the golden eyes and unfavourable colouring. No one will be dyeing their skin and hair to match the look of the poorest of the poorest, the slums of Twelve and the barren fields of Eleven. In her interview she'd been modest out of terror, and she'd sat on that stage to desultory applause and known they'd rather have anyone else than her. The favourite had been the pretty boy from One, but any of the Careers, even the charming farmer's daughter from Ten, would have been better than the one who hid.

The other Victors, when she met them on the Tour, treat her with indifference at best, and seething jealousy at worst. The Careers don't think she deserves to be here, though they have no quarrel with her; it's not her fault that their own wasted away while she managed to cling to life just long enough to hear those trumpets, but they have nothing in common, either. They don't hold the same respect for her that they do the ones who spilled blood to be here. The other outliers, on the other hand, regard her with deep envy; she didn't have to kill anyone, didn't have to fight, and can turn a corner without tensing and searching for absent weapons. They shun her because it was easy.

They don't know that she dreams the same as all the others, of darkness and deep, gnawing hunger; of the other tributes by her bedside, digging their fingers into her shoulders, pulling her hair, demanding to know why she's alive when they are not. They've never been inside her giant house in the deserted Victors' Village and seen that every inch of space is stocked with food, cans and boxes of non-perishables lining the walls and filling every cupboard, because she spent three weeks dying of hunger and will never, ever do it again.

Yet she has no secrets. No tricks. No valuable inside information except how to tighten her belly and hang on with her fingernails while starvation claws at her insides, and she looks at these children, at the bones protruding from their wrists, and she knows this is knowledge she will not have to impart to them.

They look at her and ask her for advice. The boy's face is a mess of tears and mucus, and he wipes it on his twice-a-year Reaping-and-Tour shirt; the girl is better, fists clenched, trying to be brave, but her eyes leap about the car and can never settle on a single spot. Seeder pushes back the nausea. If nothing else, she can keep it from them a little while longer.

"Eat up," she says. "You've never seen food this delicious in your life, I reckon. You'll want to keep your strength up."

She only ever saves one, a young man brimming with anger who ignored every piece of advice she gave him and won on his own terms. Seeder's legacy is not in Victors, or sponsorship agreements or gifts or funds, but that her tributes never go into the Arena in tears, choking on the stench of their own deaths before it happens. The outliers sneer at her and say she's unrealistic - the Careers think it's funny-sad - but it's all she has. Year after year as her children are cut down before they have time to be afraid, Seeder tells herself that will have to be enough.

* * *

**Haymitch**

The one thing he learns about the other mentors is they talk a lot of shit about choice.

The Career kids _choose_ to volunteer, is a popular gripe from the outliers, and Haymitch might have no sympathy when one of them rips open one of his girls and laughs at the blood shower, but nobody who's worked in the mines like he has would be able to back that up. A mouse might choose to go left or right but it's still the scientist who put him in the maze and teased him with the smell of cheese in the first place. Haymitch looks at those kids and he doesn't see choice, he sees brainwashing. He's more blase about the Career kids than the other outlying mentors because keeping grudges takes effort, and Haymitch is all out of fucks to give. So the Careers butcher his kids every year. If they didn't do it, someone would, and at least five out of six of them die every year anyway.

Meanwhile the Career mentors think that the outlying districts _choose_ to send their kids in without training or proper food, like the only thing keeping them from making the same sweet deal is a kind of deep-rooted masochism. Haymitch hears them talking - he hears a lot of things, funny what happens when you spend all your time half passed out, people think you don't hear anything and that means they talk a lot more when you're around - and they roll their eyes, say things like _victim complex_ and _savages_, like the kids in Eleven who spend all day climbing trees in the orchard ever actually get to do more than sniff one of the fruits they pluck. Everyone cries when a twelve-year-old gets picked, the Careers sneer, but anyone bigger or stronger could volunteer for them and they choose not to. It's all a crock of shit. It doesn't matter to the Careers that those strong eighteen-year-olds who watch a stranger stand up on stage could have three brothers and sisters at home, could be pulling double shifts and working twenty hours a day to keep their family fed. That even if it's their little brother or sister out there, it still leaves the most capable member of the family dead, and that ain't nice math but it ain't nice in the boonies, either. It doesn't matter to the Careers that in the sticks these kids see death every day, walking over corpses with their ribs stuck out like a xylophone, passing the crumpled form of somebody who got whipped too hard and now lies in a heap of bloody streaks, crawling with buzzing flies, so it's not really that big a deal which kid goes to the block this year.

His favourite is the one he hears most often, said by the escorts in a disappointed murmur, his stylists in a fit of fury as they wash the vomit out of his hair, the other mentors in a mix of exasperation, resignation and disgust. It's the biggest load of bullshit of them all, and it's the one that gets under Haymitch's fingernails like coal grime and never goes away no matter how hard he tries to scrub it away. He and the other mentors like him _choose_ to let their kids die instead of helping them the best they can. That one morning Haymitch just rolled out of bed and chose to use his entire month's stipend on boot-polish liquor smuggled in through the back of the Hob and drink it in one go, that he just looked at the kids sitting wide-eyed and terrified in the train and chose not to care that they were about to be turned inside-out in just over a week's time. That he and the mentors like him chose to turn themselves into apathetic monsters.

Haymitch drinks, and when he drinks he gets mean, because that's how booze works in Twelve. It's not the fruity, fluttery things in the Capitol that taste like cotton candy and leave you feeling like you could float to the ceiling. Twelve rotgut ain't called that because it's what you serve your mama at a fancy dinner. It started with one, to help him sleep, only that one became two, and that two became four, and anyone who's ever seen a bouncing pebble turn into a full-on cave-in that fills in a tunnel and kills twelve miners knows what happened next.

About a decade in, Haymitch gets sick of hearing about _choice_ one too many times, and he shuts them up. For three years running he stays cold sober, talks to his tributes every chance he gets, filling their heads with strategy and the right mix of encouragement and realism. He chats it up with sponsors - even fucks a few of them, the ones who like his sort of homespun roughness and sharp tongue - and makes sure his kids get the best deal they possibly could. He works his ass off as the others talk about how he's finally applying himself for once, and three years running his kids end up facedown in the dirt with their blood watering the flowers in the first thirty seconds anyway.

After that, the next year Haymitch shows up to Mentor Central for the bloodbath with a flask in his hand and a nasty glare twisting his face, and nobody says a damn thing.

Haymitch didn't choose to end up this way, but he did anyway. He didn't _choose_ anything, just like nobody in Panem chooses anything. Except they do choose, don't they, all of them, at least according to the giant sack of bullshit that everyone keeps piling on, because that's what this country is built on, the illusion of choice and a whole lotta bullshit, and if everyone pitches in then it gets bigger, stronger. If they stop then it will dry up and fall down and the whole thing will crumble into dust because there's nothing underneath.

It's the sort of thing that sounds philosophic in his head but when he says out loud, the others titter and make remarks about his drinking because there's too much poison in it. And what's worse, to live on the top of a pile of shit or to die when it collapses?

For years, Haymitch believes it's better to stick with the hell you know than the one you don't, at least there are no surprises. But then comes a girl, who with nothing more than a little sister, a bow, and a boy who loves her, shows Haymitch that shit can be good for one more thing: as fuel for a fire.

For the first time in twenty years, Haymitch makes a choice. For the first time in twenty years, Haymitch shows up at the semi-regular 'poker game' that they keep inviting him to and he keeps turning down. He drops into a chair and jerks his chin in a nod. "Deal me in."

Plutarch Heavensbee smiles. "About time."

* * *

**Katniss**

"The President expects a good show," Haymitch warned her on the roof that night. "You'd better do your best, sweetheart. It's only starting from here."

She rolled her eyes at him. "I'm smart enough to know that," she tossed at him, heady with victory, with the feel of soft satin against her skin and the warm breeze against her cheek. The sky above her, wide and clear and open, no gridlines, no parade of the fallen, no Capitol seal. Even the chaos of the Capitol skyline below her, the coruscation of lights and cacophony of the thousands of voices screaming in the main square, pressed against her as a comfort.

"Ain't you just," Haymitch drawled, and shook his head, but he left her alone.

Haymitch is right - it's only just started - but not the way Katniss thought. She survives the Capitol, the harrowing interviews and coronation and all those parties, and finally, finally gets to return home. Except it's not the home she left behind. Katniss has changed just like Peeta swore he wouldn't, and she can't tell if it's just that she's so different, so broken, that what once felt familiar now rubs against her skin like sandpaper, like the rough men's trouser fabric out for barter at the Hob, or if home changed too while she was gone.

What she is sure of is that instead of leaving all the expectation behind in the Capitol, she's brought it back with her. And now she's drowning in it.

District Twelve expects her to be their symbol, their hero. People stop her in the streets, shake her hand, touch her face and run their fingers down her braid, and miss the part where she flinches, where she expects the knife or the sword or the ring with its poisoned spike. They tell her she's an inspiration, and they shove red-faced squawking infants at her - she's terrified, what if she breaks them, the only thing her hands are good for is firing arrows and building snares and placing flowers on the bodies of dead little girls - and tell her they've named them after her. They expect her to be solid. They expect her to give them hope. They don't know that Katniss has nothing left inside but blood and roses, that every day that passes the world presses heavier and heavier upon her until she rewards herself if she manages to get out of bed on her own.

Prim expects her to be the big sister who promised to save her, and Katniss tries, she does. Except that Prim's different too, older and harder and determined even though she's still so small, even though she never remembers to tuck in her shirt, and it doesn't make sense but that's the way it is. Prim talks about courage, about how watching Katniss on that screen gave her inspiration to do something, make something, and whenever Katniss tells her no, stop, stay here, stay quiet, stay twelve forever, please please please, Prim looks at her with her bright blue eyes so solemn and says _you were brave, how could I not be_ and another piece of Katniss' heart breaks off and buries itself in her chest.

Her mother expects her to forgive, for the Games to put things into perspective and join the tattered ends of their family back together. To be fair, Katniss almost does. She went catatonic for a whole day after Rue's death - hours of her memory gone, replaced with nothing but screams, the wind in the trees, and the whistle of the mockingjays carrying out the final notes of her farewell song over and over until Katniss broke out of her stupor and used Rue's slingshot to startle them away - and she'd only known her for a matter of days. Her mother had known and loved her father for half a lifetime. But then Katniss looks at her mother, at the drawn lines of her face, at her hollow eyes, and thinks about stepping on that stage for Prim without a second thought, about the lives she took and the hells she faced just to come back to her, when her mother couldn't even braid Prim's hair for months, and it turns out understanding doesn't mean much at all.

Gale expects them to pick up where they left off, whatever that means, assuming they had anything to pick up in the first place, assuming there's anything left now at all. Katniss is nothing but broken shards, smashed and scattered on the floor, and at first she's grateful for Gale, for his solidness, his stubborn insistence that things can be the way they were, for his warm hands and the smell of the woods in his hair, for the way he helps her find the pieces of herself she'd forgotten. Except that there's a wanting now - or maybe there always was, and like with Peeta she just didn't know how to look - in the way his eyes pierce her when he thinks she's not looking, the pauses in his speech, and a new strangeness in his hand at the small of her back.

Haymitch expects her to let him down. Sometimes Katniss wants to, just to get it over with, except that letting him down means death for her, for Peeta, for her family, and so she grits her teeth and ignores the way he snorts whenever he sees her. She tells him he's losing his touch, that she only smelled him coming from halfway across the Seam this time. He tells her he's impressed she got dressed today, asks how many servants it took her to tie her shoes. She knows what he expects, but she'll be reaped again if she can figure out what he wants. She steals a bottle every time she stops by, just because she can.

Peeta expected her to love him, expected the words she said and the kisses she laid against his mouth in the cave to mean something; expected the whispered promises and platitudes and pleas to the sponsors, to the Gamemakers, to Haymitch, for someone - anyone - to care and save her, to be more than just the terrified and calculated moves of a terrified and calculating girl. He expected her to take his hand when no one was watching. Expected her to look at him with something other than confusion and distance as soon as the cameras flicked off. She's not sure which is worse, the expectation that was or the sheer, dull lack of it now. He avoids her, stays in his shiny new house and paints his pictures, and the worst part is, she can't even decide if she's relieved. She's glad not to have the weight of his hopes on her shoulders, but at the same time, having them ripped away and left dangling like the remains of a cobweb in her windowsill leaves her empty and desperate.

Katniss has run out of miracles, and so expects nothing of herself.

* * *

**Peeta**

He'd thought ... he'd thought. Well, he'd thought, that's all. He'd also been wrong. Peeta will have the rest of his life to let that stick, and the good news is, he's got an extra few decades more than he thought he'd have last summer, just to make sure he really understands. Haymitch is forty, and that's with him making his best efforts to drown himself with cheap grain liquor. Peeta should at least be able to beat that.

Peeta knew, when he sat there on that stage with Caesar Flickerman and told his biggest secret-that-wasn't - everyone in the merchant quarters knew, and probably half the Seam could've if they'd had the time and energy to care - that this was nevertheless news to Katniss, that the ache in his chest wasn't mutual. Nobody who hid behind trees for eleven years to watch a girl trudge home to the slums without even glancing back at him would think otherwise.

He didn't say it because he expected her to run into his arms. He said it because Haymitch pulled him aside and told him it was on his face plain as if he'd decorated it like one of his cakes, and Peeta was dead either way but he could save his girl, maybe, if he humiliated the hell out of her first.

And so he had, and he'd meant to leave it there - play Caesar, play the audience, play the Capitol, play the Games, play them all his way, with words of love and quiet resignation instead of acts of murder and monsters and madness - except Katniss changed all that. She changed it like she always had, on her own and without meaning to, without even knowing. She didn't know when she dropped that branch that Peeta had allied with the Careers to save her. She didn't know that she'd thrown everything into the wind.

Because the Careers saw Peeta turn back, saw him warn her, and as soon as the venom wore off enough for them to move, Cato dragged Peeta down to the river by his hair, slashed open his leg, and left him there to rot on the rocks. Nice of him to bring Peeta to a spot in the open, lots of cameras, with a good view of the sky so he could see Katniss' face in it when they killed her. "Enjoy the show, loverboy," Cato grinned at him. Clove kissed a knife and mimed throwing it at his heart.

Peeta knew, he did. Except that there, by the river, blood poisoning and the last of the tracker jacker venom pumping through his veins, somehow it all got confused. He felt her hands on his face, stroking back his hair; her lips warm against his throat. Her fingers, piercing his chest, digging deep and tearing out his heart. When he saw her in front of him the day after the rule change - an announcement he'd missed in the haze of pain and delirium - it was only one of hundreds, and not until she jarred his leg and he nearly bit off his tongue from the agony did he realize this time it was real.

Pain, real. No pain, not real. He should've made that connection sooner, kept it in his head long after she dragged him to that cave. Instead, Peeta made the worst rookie mistake of all, buying his own con.

Peeta's life is a bestseller, an action thriller with a romance tossed in to spice it up, pure fiction with only a grain of truth at the heart of it, yet here he is, standing at the front of the line on release day with a fistful of cash, waiting to devour every word.

It didn't much to sell him on his own lie. A few kisses, her head against his shoulder, the nearness of death and the desperation doing its best to claw its way out from the inside, and Peeta drank up every trick just as surely as the soup she fed him. When she looked at him at the end, the berries in her hand and fire in her eyes, he believed for those precious seconds that she meant it. That she couldn't bear to go back to District Twelve without him, that the lonely candle burning in his chest for all those years had finally found another to light, that the small, pathetic flame had spread.

After they win, Haymitch tells Katniss she has to convince the Gamemakers she did it out of love, not rebellion. Peeta only finds out later, because Haymitch never had this conversation with him. He didn't need to.

(There's a moment, during their victory interview, where Caesar Flickerman gets it. Peeta notices after the tenth or fifteenth time he's watched it - he can't stop, and he probably shouldn't, but seeing them together on that couch brings it home for him, helps him drive away the nightmares that they never left - and when he does he can't make himself stop seeing.

_I couldn't imagine life without him_, Katniss says, a shy smile on her face (Katniss is never shy, not like this, not modest and shy, not demure and shy, she gets angry and embarrassed and surly and squirrely but never like that, why didn't he see it, why why why) -

Peeta looks at Katniss, the cameras tight on his face as he smiles back (because he didn't want to, that's why) -

They join hands (her palms had been sweaty, why would they be sweaty when they were safe and happy, oh, oh it's so obvious now) -

Caesar Flickerman's expression freezes, stutters, and the easy, affectionate smile falls from his face, just for a second, and he looks at Peeta with horror and sympathy and savage understanding, like a dead man walking (Peeta didn't notice, his thoughts filled with her) -

_And what about you, Peeta?_ Caesar asks, his face back to normal.

_She saved my life._

_We saved each other._

The audience goes wild, and there in the Village Peeta presses his fingers against his eyelids, hits 'rewind' and watches again. Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time Caesar will smile. Haymitch finds him somewhere around the fiftieth repetition and takes the tape away.)

He let himself believe it, swallowed the lie as easily as he would have done the nightlock, and no less painlessly, but what's worse is that he blamed her for it. He blamed her for playing him, for making him think she felt the same, even for Haymitch's favour, and they return to their district in awkward silence, a perfect mirror for their journey in the opposite direction, quiet and unhappy and unsure of whom to trust.

Katniss slips through the boundary fence again - Peeta watches her - and a few minutes later, Gale Hawthorne follows. They never come back together, but that doesn't matter. Peeta can't help the surge of jealousy, of anger. Did Gale slit a girl's throat for her? Did Gale run back into a cloud of tracker jackers to warn her? Did Gale spend two weeks prepared to die for her? Gale did none of these things, but it's to him that Katniss goes for solace, and Peeta chokes back his resentment and ruins a canvas with a careless swipe of the brush.

"What did you expect?" Haymitch asks when Peeta finally goes to him, broken and desperate and aching for reassurance from the only other person who might have a hope of understanding. "You really think that with all that, the starving and the killing and the hunting, not to mention keeping your infected ass alive, that she had time to fall in love? You owe that girl your life. She doesn't owe you shit."

Peeta has no idea why he thought Haymitch would be any comfort.

Two months in, Peeta sends the servants away. They're from the Capitol - it didn't feel right, using people from Twelve - and their constant presence unnerves him, reminds him of the Avoxes in the Games Complex. Dad doesn't care, and neither do his brothers - they spend most of their days at the bakery anyway - but Mother is furious that he would be so selfish.

She screams at him for what feels like hours, then pulls back her arm to strike him like she's done so many times over the years - his mental vision fractions with the memories - except this time there's a difference. This time Peeta's arm blocks her hand before it reaches his face, before his mind even realizes he's moved. This time he steps in close, twists his hand in her shirt. He says, "Not anymore." For the first time in his life, Peeta sees his mother afraid of him. For the first time, Peeta realizes that his naive wish on the rooftop, to stay the same and not let them change him, was as stupid as everything else. For the first time, Peeta wonders what others see when they look at him.

He thinks of Haymitch on the train, his foot digging into Peeta's chest, pinning him back against the chair. He wonders if he'll ever scrub the Arena from his fingers.

His mother moves out the next day. Dad and his brothers go to the bakery. Katniss and Gale sneak off into the woods. Haymitch staggers home with a fresh jog of moonshine from the Hob. Peeta locks himself in his room with his canvases and uses every last drop of red and black in his supply.

Nothing's changed. Everything's changed. Take your pick.


End file.
